


Seer: Be the ICU

by tatterdemalionAmberite (amberite)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Digressions Into Alternian Biotech, Dissociation, Fever, Half-Dead Sollux, Homestuck Microbiology Trainwreck, Meteor AU, Sickfic, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-26 22:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberite/pseuds/tatterdemalionAmberite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All that time you were looking up the wrong things, in your little seer's annex. All that time you were trying to understand the Universe, and you should have been paying attention to different questions. To how <em>life</em> works here. Dead is sometimes not permanent, wasn't permanent for Sollux the last time, but he's not God Tier either. </p><p>And there is exactly nothing numinous about the stomach contents he's feebly depositing on the hem of your skirt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Mildly AU, where the major changes are:
> 
> * Rose's mom is an MD whose astrophysics research is a compelling hobby, and Rose, being the morbid adolescent and big fan of Knowing Things that she is, regularly falls asleep on a stack of medical journals. Everyone is closer to sixteen than thirteen. 
> 
> * Rose, Karkat and Sollux are alone in the meteor base. Various tragic rampages have definitely occurred. Sollux wound up in the meteor instead of with Aradia and the other living characters are off on a mission.

Typing. Then not typing. Then he slides off the stool and collapses to the ground. That is the first indicator anyone has that Sollux is sick.

"Karkat!" you shout. "Karkat, come here." Hopefully he will hear you; he's out of the room retrieving something, has only been gone for a few short minutes. You run over and examine the fallen troll.

It takes you nearly a minute to figure out where trolls keep their pulse points. But by the time you can start taking his pulse you already know something is horribly wrong. He's breathing rapidly and shallowly and his skin is impossibly hot to the touch. You don't know very much about troll body temperature.

A human with this kind of fever would be dying of it. 

You're not sure Sollux isn't. 

You run an inventory in your head of the things you can try. Pupillary reflexes: he doesn't even _have_ pupils. Intercession from Outer Gods: inadvisable.

Footsteps are coming up on you now, pounding down the corridor. "What's wrong? - OH JEGUS. Sollux. Sollux, are you okay?"

"No, I really don't think he is," you answer. "He's--"

Karkat is doing his own examination, roughly, checking pulse points that he knows (and now you do, because you're a fast learner), checking for responses, doing strange little things you don't understand. Then he gets to his feet. "What the fuck happened?" he asks you, accusatory. "What the fuck did you _do?_ "

"Try asking different questions before jumping to conclusions," you say, sharply. "I didn't do anything, except check his pulse. He collapsed on his goddamn own. What's troll temperature supposed to be like?"

"Not like _this_ ," Karkat says, woefully, pacing in circles now. "I would think he had just worked himself into exhaustion - he just _does_ things like that sometimes - but he's clearly sick as shit."

You have a sinking feeling about this. A hunch. Maybe it's the expression on Karkat's face. Maybe it's just that Sollux seems to be in utterly woeful condition. But you know you need to act now, and you're rapidly coming to the conclusion that this may be more difficult than it appears. "What do you, I mean, what do trolls _do_ when you get sick?" you ask.

"What do you mean, what do we do?" Karkat says irritably. "We get better. Or we die. What do humans do?"

"I mean, haven't you got - doctors? Hospitals? Medicine? Not that any of these things are likely to be present on this meteor, but - knowing what you _do_ would give me a place to start looking for an instruction manual, at least..."

"No, Rose, you don't get it," Karkat says. " _We get better. Or we die._ By culling if the illness doesn't do it."

"That doesn't make sense. You've got to have _some_ kind of medical treatment. I mean, you treat injuries, right?"

"Oh, we're all taught how to prevent a wound from bleeding out. Does that look like a wound to you?" Karkat gestures to his incapacitated friend.

"Maybe he's got a hidden one that's been infected..."

"No. That doesn't happen. I've seen enough human stuff to know what you mean and that just _doesn't fucking happen_ to trolls. We bleed out or we heal up. We slaughter microorganisms like a fucking hammer and never look back. I've never seen anything like this before in my life."

You clap your hand over your mouth, suddenly feeling sick yourself, for entirely different reasons. "The Pilgrims," you say, faintly.

"The what?"

"Karkat, I have an apology to make. The worst kind of apology. Because you were correct the first time, when you snapped at me and thought this was my fault. It is my fault - for not thinking. Interspecies contact... We have a whole crop of bacteria you've never even seen before. I would have thought it would go the other way, though - would have thought trolls would be hardier than humans, that maybe _I'd_ catch something from one of _you_ , but..."

He opens his mouth to speak and then there's a faint moan from the floor. 

Sollux still seems to be out cold, but he's starting to cough and gag, a horrible struggling sound, and his shoulders are heaving. Fuck. You slide back down on your knees on the hard floor and turn him over on his side. He vomits up tiny amounts of bile, and you rap him on the back, trying to keep him from aspirating anything. Gods, the troll is bony, and you're suddenly aware of exactly how physical and material he is.

All that time you were looking up the wrong things, in your little seer's annex. All that time you were trying to understand the Universe, and you should have been paying attention to different questions. To how _life_ works here. Dead is sometimes not permanent, wasn't permanent for Sollux the last time, but he's not God Tier either. 

And there is exactly nothing numinous about the stomach contents he's feebly depositing on the hem of your skirt.

"The fuck are you saying?" Karkat is asking. "You made him sick? Why didn't you make anyone _else_ sick then? Why didn't you make _me_ sick?"

"I don't know! But he has obviously been ill for a while, so unless you're beginning to feel the onset, it's not a mine canary effect."

Karkat looks confused at _mine canary_ but you don't care to try to explain through layers of culture just now.

Sollux is blinking weakly, coming to. Another wave of heaving hits him and you keep his head steady on your knee. Mercifully there doesn't seem to be anything left to come up. His head feels like it could singe skin from your fingers just touching it, but you keep a loose hold on the back of his neck and stroke his hair, making soothing noises at him almost automatically. 

Karkat keeps going on. "Could be you humans are just made of poison and I'm immune due to my mutant blood. But we have a whole empire and walk over other species like they're crushed Faygo bottles in the street. And sometimes we make _them_ sick, but... No, this doesn't make any fucking SENSE!"

"Hello... you, too," Sollux croaks. His eyes are fluttering open, that which passes for his eyes, one socket empty and the other full of light.

Karkat stops ranting and drops to the ground across from you, staring Sollux in the face. "Sollux? Sollux, you okay?" It takes him mere seconds to slide back into a rant. "Dipshit, when were you going to tell us you were feeling bad? Maybe after you died again, for shits and giggles?" 

"Thought..." Sollux begins, and then loses his breath. You stare down Karkat fiercely and make a noise, you're not sure who at, that is half a _ssshhhhhh_ and half the hiss of a cornered cat. Karkat shuts his mouth.

"It's okay, you don't need to answer him," you tell Sollux in a quieter tone. 

Sollux keeps trying to talk, though. "Thought I was just... migraine," he says. "Or... not hang'n on to... body. Didn't know why, though..."

You shake your head. "We think you might be ill from a human bacterium," you explain, calmly. Well. You couldn't possibly imagine having a feeling right now, much less telling it to anyone, so the voice is calm, at any rate. "Your body is fighting _something_ , at least if you're made anything like us. Karkat, do trolls usually get fevers?"

"O-- occasionally. But we stomp those fuckers down, it doesn't get like this--"

"Nehhh...." Sollux' voice is weak, thready. "Think I know... They did things, injections." He rubs at a spot on his thigh and winces, as if reliving the memory physically. "In EP... Nev' took it too seriously... thought I'd be," His fingers lift to the side of his head and flop there like a fish out of water, making a feeble imitation of the universal gesture for _crazy_ , "unfit..." then his hand clenches and his eyelids close, in exhaustion or pain you can't tell.

Out of the corner of your eye you see Karkat flinch. The very air seems to stiffen around him.

EP? you mouth. "Evaluative Preparrogation," Karkat says. No one could possibly manage to enunciate that perfectly without the benefit of tightly compressed, cold, bitter rage. "For the Service. They start young, if you have too much potential... I don't understand the full details. But I think he's trying to say that whatever the Imperial nookchoads gave him made him more vulnerable to whatever came in with you."

"Not... _vulnerable_ ," Sollux manages. The effort of speaking makes him pant for breath. "I think... immune... attack..." He rolls to the side, halfway, trying to shift his weight against the floor, but he can't lever himself over on his side. "Fighting too hard. They said... happens oc-c-casionally, if... don't get a second round. System... too well defended..."

"Oh, shit," you breathe. You remember your mother coming home from being on call that one time, or rather, _not_ coming home when she was supposed to, leaving you alone for a whole day beyond when you were expecting her - and when she did come home she was wiped, not the normal kind of tired but too tired to be ironic. 

That night, as usual, she used the case as an opportunity to pop-quiz you on what you'd been reading. You knew from the tone of her voice that the patient had died and that she'd taken it personally. You missed the cause too - [cytokine storm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm), septic shock caused not strictly by infection, but by the overwhelming immune response to tiny amounts of bacterial toxins - and you did not acknowledge the tears that ran silently down her face.

There were far, far too many martinis from the moment she came in the door, and you did her the kindness of not complaining about it.

But now is not the time to be wandering in uncomfortable childhood reminiscence. Now is the time to figure out what is breaking Sollux and how to put him back together. Knowing that your mother, a proper physician, couldn't do that successfully with someone on Earth makes your heart fall into your stomach, but at the same time you know that you have no real way of gauging the logical relevance of these things. 

You are not your mother. 

She had a medical education; you have the chewed-up pieces of it like a baby condor fed knowledge from her mouth, and the less said about that analogy the better. 

But you've survived, and she has not. You have in front of you a troll who has died at least once and supposedly twice, but to all accounts seems fully biological and has not reached God Tier. And all bets are off.

You find your voice. "A second round of what? Someone, _please_ bring me a guide to these troll immunizations from hell. There has to be one somewhere. Doesn't there?" And you damn the waver in your tone at the end, because here at the end of all things, you're not entirely sure that there has to be a guide to _anything._

~~~  
There _is_ a guide, sort of, but you're going to find it in the last place you'd expect. It is not in the servers of the Furthest Ring, as far as you can tell, even after you figure out how to phrase search queries in the Alternian alphabet (which is a quick enough learning process because it's remarkably similar to English and because you're a quick study, and Troogle can usually fill in the blanks when you drop a diacritical mark.) It is certainly not in the schoolfeeding texts. 

But all of that is later. Right now: 

Sollux says something totally incoherent about his husktop and passes out again.

You check that he's breathing, and disentangle yourself slowly. Karkat takes your place. You make a trip to the alchemiter for some Sensible Things, and leave Karkat with the short form of directions on what to do if anything happens (don't let him choke; find me.)

When you return, Karkat is quieter than you've ever imagined he could be, sitting cross-legged with Sollux's head in his lap, _staring_ at his friend's unconscious face in a way that would be downright creepy if he was a human. You didn't know trolls could emote so much by being perfectly still. 

"He means a lot to you, doesn't he?"

Karkat doesn't answer right away. He's blushing, you think, and he swallows down some words. "What's all that, anyway?" he says, and gestures to what you're carrying in your arms.

"Bedding, for starters. This isn't the world's best sickroom, but --"

"I don't care. Everyone else can just deal when they get back. Sollux practically lives in here, anyway, and it's not like anyone else is going to maintain the servers while he's out." There's a harsh, sore bitterness in Karkat's voice and you're reminded not for the first time that he lost several friends recently. 

You've never been good at empty noises of sympathy, so you forgo them altogether and start setting up a makeshift cot, instead. 

"No," Karkat says. "You're doing it wrong. We don't rest on flat planes like humans do."

"I don't know how to take care of someone on a troll pile."

"At least stack the pillows up a layer or so. Look. See, that gives you space to work, right? And he can curl around them and sink in a little."

Your instincts tell you that you should be in charge of _everything_. Your instincts are wrong, and inwardly you shout them down, and you let Karkat set up the bed.

~~~

For days you are doctor and nurse and hospital and librarian and, well, Seer. It's more exhausting than anything - even than the game itself, in some ways. The game was strange and numinous and responded well to applications of needlekind and grimdark. 

Illness does not. Illness is small and wretched and material, even in a half-dead troll. It turns his skin searing-hot and raises a rash of yellow blisters on him so that he writhes with the ache of it even in his sleep and his digestion's been at a dead halt since before anyone else noticed and keeping him from starving would be a full-time job all by itself at this point. It is apparently mostly normal for Sollux that he could slice things with his ribcage, but it means he has no reserves.

Trolls at least have some level of oral absorption for simple sugars, like humans do, so you can give him calories when he's awake enough not to aspirate, even without having actual medical equipment. You've discovered that your Seer powers allow you to mainline reading materials, that you can start reading first aid handbooks and basic biology texts and do this _thing_ with your eyes and suddenly be reading three of them simultaneously and the rush makes you want to cackle out loud, or would if you could feel anything properly right now.

He's less and less lucid.

"AA. Don't leave me again," he says, while you're spooning soda into his mouth, and you let him grab your other hand, reassuringly, your traitorous human hand that exposed him to the bacteria that his body is trying to kill him over, your hand that is not Aradia's hand and never will be, and you _do_ feel things and it's _terrible_.

"Shhh," you say, "it's all right," because another thing your mother taught you well was how to lie convincingly.

"I don't deserve you," he says, quiet and solemn and wistful. "I really don't. I killed you. You're right to stay away."

You don't say anything other than "Shhhh," because you're feeling guilty enough for letting him mis-recognize you, and because he needs as much spoon-fed sugar as he can get before he grows nauseous again or loses consciousness again and it's a matter of life or death. His _heart_ could give out. 

If yours doesn't first. 

When he starts gagging and you know it's going to be a while before you can get more sugar into his system, you keep him on his side again through the awful heaving and you clean him up afterward. He slumps back into the pillow pile with his eyes shut, and maybe it's not medically necessary for _him_ that you seat yourself behind him on the pillow pile and wrap your arms tight around his shoulders, but you do anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

Sollux starts seizing while you're asleep. Or half-asleep, which is about as far as you go these days. Hearing him cry out insensibly is what wakes you up. Karkat's managed to alchemize a thermometer out of a husktop thermosensor and some other pieces and you've been tracking his temperature that way; you can't use it right now but you don't need to know that he's hotter than before, and you're downright frightened for him, and after he stops thrashing you and Karkat haul him into a sponge bath. 

And then Karkat leaves you alone with him, leaving you sitting there terrified that this has done permanent damage, that Sollux just won't wake up again.

But somehow, mercifully, when Sollux comes out of it he's actually lucid for a moment, enough to see that you're not Aradia, even, and as you dab the blood off his face he says, mushmouthed, "S' all right, Rose, don't... don't worry. 'M technically dead already."

You realize that this bare shadow of a troll is saying this because he is _trying to reassure you_. To reassure _you_. Something cracks in you then.

What it is, you can't understand; only that from then on it's like there's a leak inside you, like you're bleeding internally. You can't go on this way and you're going to expire of it eventually and there's nothing to do for it but keep sponging him down and tell yourself inwardly that Everything Is Fine.

Karkat left in the middle of all this and he hasn't come back yet and you have to go find him. You have to leave Sollux alone in a drained bathtub to go find him, because calling for him hasn't helped, and so by the time you find him you are _livid_. 

You immediately understand, at least, why Karkat hasn't heard you calling for him. He's tucked away in the farthest room he could find, busily screaming and punching a wall. When you give him a look of incredulity he starts ranting. Normally you would feel sympathetic. Right now you are far too consumed with worry for Sollux to give a shit, but that doesn't deter him. (Especially because you haven't actually _told_ him to stop ranting, but who lets common sense get in the way of a good head of steam? ... You, usually. But right now, you're too far gone.)

"God, I should have been more observant," he moans, hoarse from yelling. "I should have said something. His hands were shaking, Rose, the day before he fell over, but I didn't say anything, I thought it was too much coffee... A brainless grub could have seen he was sick. I'm the worst -- friend Sollux could possibly have."

As you shove the snub-horned troll physically against the bulkhead you realize three things. 

One: shoving a troll at _least_ twice your strength is a remarkably idiotic act. He could have you on the ground in a heartbeat, could have you dead in two, and you hope Dave never gets word of this foolhardy escapade.

Two: Karkat is too fucked up in the head to resist. The wiry muscles under his skin should hold him firmer on his center of gravity than this. You should not be able to grab him by the collar and slam him to the wall. But it doesn't feel like he's consciously giving way, _letting you win_. He stumbles aimlessly, as if his emotional state has sapped his ability to direct his movement.

Three: the hesitation when he said "friend" means he's stupidly in love.

Then you have the heels of your hands pressed into his collarbones and you're shouting at him at the top of your voice. "Fuck you! This is _not about you_. This is _not your fault._ If it's anyone's fault, it's mine. I brought the boatload of toxic alien bacteria, remember? Me. Not you. You are, in this instance, required to sit your fucking ass down and let someone else take the blame this time."

He takes a breath like he means to protest, but sags against the wall instead. Your feeble human pinning efforts make very little difference once he decides to let gravity take over. "I just... should have noticed..."

"Trust me," you tell him. "You cannot hope to defeat me at the business of not recognizing when things get truly awful because normal is so close to awful anyway. I'm simply the best there is."

~~~

The others return from their exploratory mission. You set Kanaya to the task of culturing out Sollux's blood, though if the hypothesis you've all sort of agreed upon for his illness is accurate, playing find-the-microbe is probably not useful and will take too long to do any good anyway. But you feel your mother would not respect you if you did not at least try. You expect to have to explain a lot more than you do, but Kanaya knows a lot of things; and she knows them in the way of someone who's had to figure them out for yourself.

You wish, not for the first time, that you had grown up with trolls around you instead of humans, all full of irons in the fire and the stalwart psychological calluses of neglect, every last one of them. If you had known these people younger your adolescence would have been less _alone_. 

Sollux's illness is going on three days and you're scared every time you look at him, because the dark-grey cast of his skin means that his filtration sponges might be starting to go. He moves in the pile like he's uncomfortable in his own skin.

Sometimes he calls you by your name and other times he calls you Aradia but every time he calls for you, you let him hold your hand, and his face relaxes a little and it looks like he's in a little less pain.

~~~

There was a question, once, and you were going to answer it. A problem, and you were going to solve it. That's what a doctor does, your mother would tell you, along with Being Fine No Matter What. You're not a doctor. But that is also what a Seer does, and you are a Seer.

Sollux got the first half of something, once, shoved into him by their fascist Empire, and whatever it is is going to kill him unless you can figure out the second half. With everyone else there you can break from support care long enough to _read more_ , and you do. You start getting to know Sollux better thorough the files on his husktop.

This is where you find the missing piece, the information you're looking for: an extremely locked-down folder named _fucked up 2hiit_.

Even after you get Sollux's password from him you can't get in on the first try and it takes Karkat fifteen minutes of fooling around with encryption settings before the contents are visible. He looks pleased with himself when he's done and mutters something about that damned modus being educational after all. 

Educational isn't even the half of what's in the folder.

Journal articles and schematics and files that look like photocopies of photocopies and it looks like the kind of careless "download all the things" file pile you'd get from a torrent site and all of it is _horrible_.

It only barely surprises you, that Sollux _knew_ that someone was probably going to cut him open and make him into a starship - what the early immunological priming was _for_. The amount of information on it here belies the practiced denial that was in his voice when he said 'unfit'. 

At times when Sollux is sleeping but you are too worked-up to nap and too tired to read you sometimes curl around a notebook and work on the list you've begun making, which is titled _Positive Things About the Universes Ending_. 

A lot of things about the Alternian Empire no longer existing go on that list.

Then you hit paydirt.

It helps when you run everything through an alphabet filter so you can skim the titles in a hurry. But you find one stray little article: _Immunological Effects of Tyrian-Blood Tissue Cultures in Helmsblock Biotech_ and the word 'immunological' sticks out to you like it's written in bright light and suddenly you know what you're looking for.

Cause and effect; question and answer. What they did to him boosted his _innate_ immunity. The biotech they were going to splice into his system - that would have boosted _adaptive_ immunity. The kind that remembers antigens, that gives rise to cells that 'tag and bag'. Something about superior immune _recognition_ in longer-lived, cooler-blooded trolls who can't handle as much inflammation - and how, surprise, this carries over when you use their tissue as the seed starter for biotech, and then there's reams and reams of information that you skim just well enough to find descriptions of _what the cells and the molecules they make are actually doing_.

You don't have hospital resources here; you don't have a full chemistry lab; you don't have any of the extremely specialized equipment you would need to deal with this from the standpoint of human medical research that you knew about.

But this paper is a game-changer.

Because what you do have is an alchemiter, and the corpse of a Tyrian-blooded troll, and you think you know what you can do.

~~~

"You're telling me... you made a serum out of Feferi."

"Yes. Or more accurately..."

"I'm not sure I need accuracy," Karkat says. "It's going to cure Sollux?"

"We can hope so. There are never clear-cut answers in these matters."

"He won't... reject it or something?" Karkat has been listening to you babble, apparently. You feel kind of guilty that you haven't been giving his ranting similar consideration, but you've really been too busy for that.

"Shouldn't, no." This whole thing became more comprehensible when you understood that the Tyrian lineage is technically part Horrorterror. It makes more _sense_ knowing that. It even cheers you up, because you _understand_ Horrorterrors on some level and for you they are in the category of empirical and sensible things in a way that the rest of this situation is not.

Their language is an ur-language, so of course their cells should be ur-cells, timeless, incomprehensible, unrejectable.

That still does not mean you alchemized the right _thing_.

If the serum works, it doesn't matter that you don't have a full array of sterile injection equipment. If the serum doesn't work, it also doesn't matter that you don't have a full array of sterile injection equipment, because if it doesn't work, he's going to _die_.

Neither you nor Karkat leave the room for a long time after you inject your concoction.

~~~

When he wakes up again and is _hungry_ , it's wonderful and awful.

Karkat kisses him all over his face and you...

You can't feel anything at all, and for days that was the opposite of a problem; but now it's _wrong_ , you're wrapped in foam and when the bleeding inside your soul stopped it dried into a huge immovable clot and you have to walk out of the room, drifting aimlessly, hearing the voices inside like they're calling through an echoing void. You have to stand outside. Or fall over. Falling over seems like a good idea right now.

You let Karkat and Terezi help Sollux back to the land of the living, and you lie down and sleep like something dead.

~~~

It's not your idea to go near anyone, but there are only so many places to go on the meteor. Which is how Sollux finds you, a day later, staring out a viewport. He's shaky on his feet and you think it's probably his first time walking.

You can't speak. You won't. You won't breathe; you won't open your mouth. Because if you open your mouth you'll start crying and you are _not allowed_ to start crying it is absolutely not permitted you are Rose Lalonde and you hobnob with horrorterrors and learn everything about everything and you are _competent_ and you handle _everything_ when no one else can --

\-- and all of your resolve to stand there and not breathe is made of something extremely vulnerable to skinny troll hands because when Sollux rests his on the back of your neck, it _breaks_.

You cry silently though and you don't speak until you think you can articulate something without blubbering, but he speaks first. "Hey," he says. "Hey."

Long breaths, slow, shaky, you're trying to navigate your way back to speaking.

"I'm told I spent a while thinking you were my former moirail," he says.

"It doesn't matter," you say quietly and it was the wrong thing to say, because of how he looks at you - guarded, near defeat. "I mean. I don't mind."

"I'm sure it gave you an extremely classy impression and all." 

"That's beside the point."

"What _is_ the point?" he asks. "For you, I mean. You're a human. You don't have the same emotions we do. So _is_ there a point?" 

And you're caught up by a plaintive note in his voice. You know that tone: you haven't heard it from him when he was well before, only when he was ill and trying to reassure you that it was okay if he died and calling for someone who was sometimes you and sometimes Aradia.

"What am I _supposed_ to say, Sollux? Of _course_ there's a point. I spent days knowing that it would break me into pieces if you died on my watch. That is certainly not a prime example of the professionalism that I'm only really mimicking as a protective instinct. But I also don't think I want to sleep with you." You can't afford to look him in the eye. You'll only see him again, and find it twice as hard to keep talking.

"Rose," he says. "Look. I don't blame you if you want to turn away. But there _is_ a word for that--"

"I know, okay? I know about quadrants. I read things. So yes, I think I'm having a troll emotion. Is that acceptable?" Your voice breaks a little, around the defensiveness.

" _Is it acceptable_ , she asks. I don't know. Is it?" You're aware of Sollux's hand still there on the back of your neck, telling you of reciprocation, telling you what his words aren't. Then he asks more seriously. " _Is_ it? Because I have a terrible track record at protecting the people I care about. They do altogether too well at protecting me. Even Feferi," he says, and you realize someone must have told him about the serum, about your callous act of science. "I'm still not sure how I feel about that."

"How do you _want_ to feel about that?" And you're going into a therapist-tone, translucent and reflective, and some of the tightness fades out of his voice.

"I don't know," he says. "I'm not sure I deserve it."

"I didn't know her," you tell him. "But somehow, I am certain she would be pleased to know that she saved your life."

" _You_ saved my life," he says softly, and there's a wondering note in his voice and something in you sings it back at him, silently, in a way that has nothing to do with your secondhand medical expertise.

"I also nearly killed you!" Suddenly you're standing apart, across from him, breathing hard, and his hand has dropped from your neck. "I should have thought about that before showing up here - I -"

All of the failures and misjudgments are crashing in on you at once so fast you can't even recite them. Stepping into your role in foreordained events without questioning. Failing to save your mother and John's father. And you can't breathe, and you're dizzy, and -

\-- then you're being held. His arms are still birdlike from his sickness and he's warm but no longer _too_ warm and just feeling that, feeling the temperature of his skin and knowing _you helped_ , knits together that imaginary wound inside you and something is different than what it was.

"It's acceptable," you murmur, and you hold him up as he stumbles against you, still weak. "It's acceptable."

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus: [Authorial interlude](http://homesmut.dreamwidth.org/39135.html?thread=41347551#cmt41347551) on why it took me so long to finish this thing. I don't know why I'm so excruciatingly determined to shove _Homestuck_ of all things into a coherent science framework, but there it is.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [follow him in retreat (the widows at st. angel remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/718187) by [signalbeam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam)




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